SHAPIRO: We’re Looking At A Political Crisis

This week, we learned that the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago — some of the biggest news in years. According to The New York Times, “Former President Donald J. Trump said on Monday that the F.B.I. had searched his Palm Beach, Florida, home and had broken open a safe — an account signaling a major escalation of the various investigations into the final stages of his presidency.”

Here is the bottom line: The F.B.I. is not trusted by a significant percentage of Americans. A majority of Republicans and Independents do not trust the F.B.I., according to polling data. What the F.B.I. just did requires extraordinary institutional trust. But this is an FBI under the auspices of a current administration raiding the home of the leader of the last administration and the likeliest potential nominee for the opposition come 2024. 

The raid appears to be pretextual — because if you’re going to do something like this, there had damned well better be a crime. The crime can’t be something like “the President of the United States brought stuff with him when he left office.” Bill Clinton brought half the White House with him when he left office, and he was never raided. It can’t be “the President of the United States has a battle with the National Archives over material” — especially if what we are talking about here is not particularly important material. It must be more than that.

Then there’s the problem that the President of the United States has plenary authority to declassify anything he wants while he is in office. So all the other cases being referenced this week with regard to situations in which people have mishandled classified material are referring to people who were not the President of the United States. For example, former Clinton national security adviser Sandy Berger received a misdemeanor charge in 2015 for stuffing classified documents down his pants, and, in 2016, the F.B.I. investigated Hillary Clinton’s mishandling of classified documentation. She could not declassify anything; she was the Secretary of State. She was not the President of the United States. And she was never actually raided. Remember, they grabbed Anthony Weiner’s laptop; they went in a variety of directions trying to garner Hillary Clinton’s emails. Despite the fact that James Comey announced that it was actually “[p]ossible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account” because of her mishandling of the classified documents, her house was never raided. Her offices were never raided by the F.B.I..

And then for several years under President Trump, the F.B.I. actively attempted to undermine the President of the United States on pretextual information provided by the Clinton campaign on the basis of the Steele dossier. James Comey, when he was head of the F.B.I., approached Donald Trump to launder the Steele dossier into the press — knowing that there was nothing in the Steele dossier that had been verified. Comey told him about it simply so that the media could then run with the story that the Steele dossier had been presented to President Trump and, therefore, was newsworthy. That prompted years and years of investigations down rabbit holes that led nowhere with regard to Russiagate. 

Trust in the FBI is at an all time low, and yet it’s the F.B.I. under Christopher Wray — apparently with a warrant that had to be signed off on by the DOJ and Attorney General Merrick Garland — now initiating a raid into the former president of the United States. 

Could there theoretically in some world be a rationale for this sort of activity? Sure, there could. But is that going to have to be a damned extraordinarily solid — bedrock solid — rationale with serious underlying evidence? It had better be – or what we are looking at is a political crisis. When a current administration is investigating former administrations to the point of sending the F.B.I. into their home to pick up documents on the basis of not handing them over to the National Archives — even during negotiating — it looks more like an attempt to take Donald Trump out of the running come 2024 than anything else. Or maybe, nefariously, it’s an attempt to elevate Trump for 2024. We don’t know. But here is what we do know: If there is no extraordinary basis for this raid, then what we are looking at is a crisis in American governance right now. It looks like the intelligence apparatus is being weaponized against the opponents of a political administration. 

And down the road, if this comes to nothing and Donald Trump runs and loses, do you think that there are going to be a lot of people who are going to trust that he actually lost? Again, the trust in our institutions is so low right now, and they’re exacerbating all